Just over one in five part time workers want to work more hours, according to new figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In September 2002, 22% of part- time workers wanted to work more hours, a decrease of 2 percentage points from 12 months before. This figure represented just over 6% of the 9,367,400 people employed in Australia in September 2002.

Of the 589,800 part-time workers wanting more hours of work, 41% (243,500) were looking for work with more hours and were available to start work with more hours in the week prior to the survey.

A higher proportion of male part-time workers (30%) wanted to work more hours than female part-time workers (19%). Nearly three quarters (72%) of male part-time workers wanting more hours wanted to work full time, compared with 47% of females.

On average, part-time workers looking for, or available to start work with more hours, wanted an additional 15.2 hours each week. Males wanted to work more additional hours (16.7 hours) than females (14.2 hours).

Just over half (51%) the people who wanted more hours had been looking for work with more hours. The most common steps taken were:

contacted prospective employers (65%)

looked in newspapers (57%)

asked current employer for more hours (52%).

The two main reasons for not having found work with more hours were:

no vacancies in line of work (21%)

lacked necessary skills or education (11%)

Further information is inUnderemployed Workers, Australia, September 2002(cat. no. 6265.0).

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